Frazier comes to Pine Ridge eager to achieve "that self-possessed sense of freedom" he believes the Indians uniquely understand, and when he first sets foot on the reservation, he thinks: "I feel as if IĪm in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we're gone." Southwestern South Dakota, where his friend Le War Lance (whom readers first met in "Great Plains") now makes his home. Frazier's fascination with the Indians of the Great Plains, taking the author to the Pine Ridge Reservation in Plains," is a sadder, darker and in many ways less satisfying book. Frazier wrote, "not much stops it" - "On the Rez," a sequel of sorts to "Great Whereas that earlier book had an air of exuberance about it - "Once happiness gets rolling in this open place," Mr. Were "enormous, bountiful, unfenced," and in that book he filled in some of those blanks with names and stories, peopling that vast Western prairie with individuals he met in the course of his 25,000-mile journey. Not just the mythic dimensions of its history and not just the mundane facts relating to its highways and byways and towns, but the shimmering, miragelike overlap of the two. 'On the Rez': Looking for a 'Big Sky' and Finding DespairīOOKS OF THE TIMES 'On the Rez': Looking for a 'Big Sky' and Finding Despair By MICHIKO KAKUTANIĪn Frazier's 1989 book, "Great Plains," was one of those enchanting books that thoroughly captured the peculiar mood and magic of a place:
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